I can hardly recall a conversation in Dublin this past summer when no one mentioned the “Celtic Tiger,” the irritating catch phrase commonly used to describe the runaway Irish economy. This boom or bubble is transforming the country, in particular the capital city—and not necessarily for the better. While prosperity is obviously welcome, it is happening too fast. Before winning her independence from Britain in the 1920s, this country, with its large landed estates, was practically a feudal society. A commonly expressed witticism asserts that Ireland has leapt straight from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first, bypassing the twentieth century altogether. One might even enlarge that exaggeration by asking whether the Romantic movement ever hit Ireland—in which case the leap began somewhere in the late eighteenth century.

What has drawn me to visit Dublin once or twice a year over the past decade has nothing to do with the highly suspect Gaelic feline mentioned above. Dublin is an incomparable if constantly threatened gem of Georgian architecture, the contemplation of which freshens one’s sense of pure form. Like the music of Mozart, Dublin’s streets and squares and monumental public buildings are a Euclidean fragment of the eighteenth century cast adrift in the perilous waters of the present. Its literary world is as contentious, and even vicious, as anywhere on earth, yet this is a city where poetry thrives. The theater here, though tiny by comparison with London’s, is vital and innovative. Above all, Dublin is a stage where personality dominates